Anna

As the daughter of two engineers, Anna has always been surrounded by opportunities to learn about science and technology. Her parents encouraged her to become involved in science fairs from an early age, and the experience of designing and conducting her own research projects inspired her to pursue additional opportunities.

Anna’s summer research project focused on co-culture systems, where two or more cell types are grown together in order to model their normal environment. She was tasked with trying to improve the quantitative analysis of co-culture images, which are widely used in studies of hepatotoxicity, cell migration, and cancer. The work exposed her to the importance of bioinformatics techniques to enable biologists to extract meaningful information from the wealth of data in microscopy images.